Douglas Woodward

Douglas Woodward is Adjunct Professor and Associate Director, Professional Development and Practice in the Urban Planning program. His work as a planner and urban designer in New York focuses on complex multi-use projects in dense urban environments. He was Deputy Executive Director and Chief Administrative Officer at the Lincoln Center Development Project (LCDP) for the first redevelopment of Lincoln Center, where he managed the public review process and public space design for the $1.4 billion redevelopment of Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, the world’s largest performing arts center. He was subsequently Chief Planning Officer and Senior Director of Real Estate Development at LCDP in charge of entitlements, valuations, and the land use approvals process for the redevelopment of David Geffen Hall and other major campus projects.

Prior to his work at Lincoln Center, he worked as an urban designer at the Department of City Planning in New York, where his projects focused on master planning, major area-wide rezonings, and large-scale development, including master plans and rezonings for Columbus Circle, Lower Manhattan, Hudson Yards, and Times Square. While at City Planning, he founded the Office of the Chief Urban Designer with the late Lauren F. Otis. As Vice President for Design and Development at Edison Properties, he led the project to create new architectural design identities for Edison’s Manhattan Mini-Storage, Edison ParkFast and Workspace brands.

He has taught urban planning at GSAPP since 1991. At Columbia, he coordinated Public Space in the Private Realm with Jerold S. Kayden, a six-school consortium of design and planning studios (Columbia, Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Penn, and the City University of New York) on the subject of privately owned public space (POPS), which was exhibited at the Van Alen Institute. In the aftermath of September 11, he directed the Lower Manhattan Recovery Studio at Columbia, working with downtown Community Board 1 and local residents. Recent studios include Reimagining Chinatown with Manhattan Borough President Gale Brewer and Councilmember Margaret Chin as clients; and a series of joint Architecture and Urban Planning studios with Richard Plunz as co-instructor, including Restructuring Quarto, with the Mayor of Genoa, Italy as the client, and three Puerto Rico-based joint studios: New Paradigms for a Resilient Vieques; Building Sovereign Systems: Empowering the People of Culebra; and Caribbean Reconnections: Plan and Implementation in Puerto Rico, with local governments and NGOs as clients. Other courses have included seminars and practica on Ethnic Enclaves; Planning for a Green New Deal; Planning in the Cultural Space; Project Management; and Public Space in the Private Realm.

He is the co-author of Under the Elevated: Reclaiming Space, Connecting Communities (2015), a study of the potential of creating public space beneath elevated infrastructure.